It is with dismay that we have learned that the Employment Insurance Commission has been ordered to appeal the recent Social Security Tribunal ruling that the provisions of the Employment Insurance Act that limit the right of mothers to receive employment insurance benefits when they lose their job during or following maternity leave constituted discrimination based on sex.
Posted at 12:00 p.m.
The appellants have, however, demonstrated that the Employment Insurance Act had real consequences for the well-being and economic security of women, and the Court agreed with them: “ [Si] a woman loses her job during her maternity and parental leave, she no longer has protection. She must therefore rely on her savings or the income of her spouse. This keeps women in poverty and in a dependency relationship. This is to consider women’s income as a supplementary salary that does not deserve the same protection. […] Because they are women who have had a pregnancy, they cannot obtain the benefits of other insured persons. »
Why challenge this judgment when in his mandate letter, the Right Honorable Justin Trudeau instructed the Minister responsible for Employment Insurance, Carla Qualtrough, to “address the deep systemic inequalities and disparities that remain present in our social fabric? , especially within our fundamental institutions”?
Why deny the facts, once demonstrated, when the minister recognized the 1er last January that the current regime creates inequities for new mothers, even declaring that she “eagerly desires [s]’attack it’?
We invite the Minister to take advantage of the modernization of the employment insurance program underway in order to adapt it to the 21and century. A simple solution claimed by several community, feminist and union organizations involves the government modifying the Employment Insurance Act so that all working women have the right to protection in the event of unemployment, independently of any absence from the labor market related to pregnancy, maternity and family responsibilities. This amendment would put an end to the effects considered to be discriminatory and sexist that women experience in this file. While waiting for a legislative amendment, elementary decency would have been not to challenge a judgment that only confirms the discrimination that the Trudeau government claims to want to tackle!
* Co-signatories: Autonomous and united movement of the unemployed (MASSE), Network of regional tables of women’s groups in Quebec (RTRGFQ), Intervention council for women’s access to work (CIAFT), CSD, CSQ, CSN , FTQ, FIQ, APTS, FAE, SFPQ and SPGQ